He was never much one for personal individuality so he got his mirrored pictures from those around him, much like someone learns later of his childhood from elder others.

With patience, later in the day or week, he pieced together who he might be for healthy company’s sake – from a word here, a word there

all became clear, until he met a hermes-aphrodite-eating tigris europaeus on the jungle path who spoke of R.W.’s flight from authoriteez, the Walkereez perhaps, and D.H.L.’s recovery of the lost man in Mexico and the living woman in Eastwood,

and he realised he hadn’t been far wrong in giving his self a chaotic reading of the signs – pointing to a clearing of the clearing of the clearing of the final Clearing-House.

The faqir cleaned the carpet of the zawiyya with his bare hands, picking up carefully the traces of past dhikrs, the traces of the fuqara, in quietness, the coloured design filling his gaze unaware anyone had entered with a powerful hoover to work quick, noisy wonders in efficiency from its global socket.

Kein Wunder was in Kemnichts passiert!

If the sheriff’s posse they sent to the people of tasawwuf

had been literate to any degree in the science of the nafs

and the fitra,

they would have transmitted to Berlin – or Munich –  that the cure lies in telling people

about Allah,

mit Goethe, am besten.

Git u’re info from source

Arab girls being mended with hymens of chinese fabrication in the back streets.

‘Don’t you trust me’ she had cried

‘My folk trust more the nuptial red’ he answered

Science of surgery meets quiz tv, high-street banks and the aspirations of a past generation wanting the ‘best’ for their offspring but not for themselves.

He ta’ala chooses the most banale things to enable you to arrive:

‘We created many of the jinn and mankind for Jahannam. They have quloub, hearts, they do not understand with’. The hearts for understanding, the intellect, ‘aql, to contain moments of wildness and ecstasy when things blow.

Is looking at a pretty maiden in the reflection of weekly-cleaned glass allowed?’ said the ‘alim to himself. ‘Yes’ came the reply – when you wish to wife her, and the weekly-cleaned glass of the public building is paid for by unjust taxes.

And death of course explains all: a word here, a word there, from him, from her, now or later in the day or week or year or month –

all explained by the final crunch, meanings unchronological come together

to make the story clear of who he was, she was, where and when.

The non-causal cause becomes.

I.e. keep the company of the flower seller and his perfume shall join the bits and bods and reveal all;

keep the company of the virtual warlord usurers and the whole shall break.

Feuernado Firestorm Firenado

They called it here Feuernado when it happened in the island to the west, and is mentioned in the Quran in the story of the two gardens when it destroyed that of the arrogant one.

Come then summer sun! and penetrate in this northern clime with your myriad midges around the beach fire for their blood to mix with ours as we roast the freshy slaughtered lamb on which those words so difficult to say of bismillah allahu akbar in these times of ignorance and war in so many places of the Muslim territoriies

for their blood causes irritation and scratches and awakens to the night watch and tahajjud, recited aloud according to our way, that of Madina and the Imam Malik.

Come sun! and cause the vermillion little wild plums and the yellow and blue ones so wee before the soopermaakit ones of kemical dung and pollooschiun

and cause the blue algae to blossom in the warm bodden waters where the pike roam to ginormous sizes for such modest waters.

Come inject your smoke of beach fire with the rays of midges to drive us swimming in the protecting waters laden with the weed where the pike lurks preyingly.

Inject your fragrant woody vapours, almost poison to the lungs but sustenance enough to call the sleeping masses to the Haqq

of sobriety and drunken wisdom.

Influx of the juices of wild pears and apples, also smaller and tarter than their basterd cousins on the shelves of air conditioned halls

after their trunks absorbed the scudding rains between the monkey’s birthday weather prevalent NOW,

bringing to the fore the fire storm, electrifying tire winter systems

and hearts of those who know.

Taqwa is akshun

and no mere idea of py-ess-ness in the faith-soaked brain of those who seek answers in their ideal world

to questions via dubious germanium or silicon:

the action of shielding your self by actions.

If you have it, says the King, He will give you knowledge

directly from Himself.

The Secret Garden by Mahmud Shabistari, Cambridge Publications, 1435, Stralsund

This work is essential for people of ihsaan for it contains all the principles of the science of tasawwuf in a concise form. Further it is the first translation freed of the centuries-old baggage of christian and orientalist vocabulary which has often obscured the teachings of Islam. Thus, instead of the ‘mystic’ statements of a ‘Sufi Doctor’, we have Shaykh Mahmud Shabistari’s lucid exposition of the deen of Islam. He demonstrates in his analysis of the lower self how a man or woman can gain access to his or her reality: the step by step description of the method of purification leads to a spirituality and light which issues from the normal actions of everyday life, in other words a spirituality which is not‘ascetic’ but rather the product of right living. As the Shaykh himself comments within the text, his ‘work is the fruit of experience – not mere information heard from others’ and again ‘an action that comes from the secret of one’s spiritual states is much better than an action based on a knowledge one has heard, yet not experienced’ and yet again ‘realize… how actions proceed from different spiritual states and what the relationship is between informative and experiential knowledge’. In the words of another great Sufi, Shaykh ad-Darqawi it is the science of how to live the spirituality of the really great, those ‘whose candles do not go out when the wind starts to blow’.

Significant too is that Shaykh Mahmud Shabistari lived in the Mughal capital of Tabriz from where issued the great flowering of the last period of Islam in which the balanced shariat – rather than the mongrel European law [applicable to the realm of ‘real life’ and trade] cum‘religious’ additions regarding births and deaths, and family law] – was still the norm.

Extensive use has been made of the commentary Mufaateeh al-A’ jaaz fi Sharhi Gulshani Raz of Shaykh Muhammad Lahiji in this work of translation from the Persian original.

This work shall only be understood by those unversed in ‘critical analysis’ – for as the Shakyh says at the end of The Secret Garden: ‘Examine the knowledges arrived at by intellect and the knowledges of Islamic tradition

– examine them in a clear order and with precision. Do not look with the eye of negation and criticism for then the flowers will turn to thorns before your eyes’.

N.B. Despite one popular encyclopaedic classification of Shabistari, al-Ghazali, al-Hallaj, Junayd, Attar, Jami, Ansari, Shibli, Abdalqadir al-Gilani, Sa’di, Maruf Kharkhi, Rumi and Shams at-Tabrizi, for example, as ‘Iranian sufis’ they were in fact all Persian speaking and lived prior to the Safavid conversion of Iran to another religion.

Introduction to Wadee’a Deposits [Diwan Press, Stralsund, 1435 ]

From two source translations –

The Book of Deposits and Safekeeping (Kitab

al-Wadee’a from al-Mudawwana al-Kubra) of the fiqh of

Imam Malik and the mujtahids of Ahl al-Madina al-

Munawwara, and Bab al-Wadee’a from Al-Qawaneen al-

Fiqhiyya by Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn

Juzayy al-Kalbi –

it is clear that the transaction of wadee’a – depositing something with another – was not only a permitted sunna but something which was undertaken by all at a community level and also as a means of facilitating trade.

Both texts are accepted by all fuqaha and were also the undisputed basis of all transactions in the territories under the jurisdiction of the fiqh of the ahl al-Madina before the onset of democratic Islamic legalism – i.e. the invention of the mongrel law of fiqh as-sunna whereby the four madhhabs were mixed up into a hotchpotch legal soup and unhinged from amr, or offered in their plurality so that anyone might pick and choose personally his own favourite ahkaam; or worse, the propagation of a basically hadith-based madhhab in which all the hadiths have equal status and no discrimination is made between those which generally should be acted upon at a community level and those which are directed at particular persons in particular situations.

The first text is taken from al-Qawaaneen al-Fiqhiyya of Muhammad ibn Ahmad bin Muhammad bin Juzayy al-Kalbi the great faqih and ‘aarif who died a shaheed at the battle of Tareef in 741 AH. The second is taken from al-Mudawwana al-Kubra, the work compiled by Sahnun at-Tanukhi on the judgements of Imam Malik himself after his discussions with the great mujtahids of the Ahl al-Madina al-Munawwara who issued from Imam Malik may Allah be pleased with him – namely Ibn al-Qasim, Ibn Wahb, Ashhab and Asbagh. It is here that we find everything which Imam Malik chose to leave out of his Muwatta. Wadee’a is first and foremost a transaction of amaana – i.e. one based on trust, and not something for which payment is normally requested. In a healthy, flourishing community of Muslims, any storage of gold and silver coins would normally be undertaken as an amaana by the authorities – i.e. the Rais,  Amir, the Sultan or the Khan: just as they would finance the activities of the Official Mint, producing dinars and dirhams with their legitimate seal, they would also provide facilities for the safekeeping of the coins prior to distribution. However, mints and the corresponding facilities for storage of gold and silver have generally disappeared since the introduction of paper money and the cancer of riba entered Egypt via Muhammad Abdou with the support of Lord Cromer. We now find ourselves in an interim situation: in the light of the growing movement away from the ribawi paper, plastic or electronic money back to halal gold dinars and silver dirhams, the number of wakalas – agencies for the distribution of these newly minted coins – is growing. As they grow, the need for secure storage also grows. As mentioned explicitly in the text of Ibn Juzayy, it is permitted to charge ‘rent’ when one takes up space in one’s own premises to store deposits of gold and silver. The hukum of wadee’a thus encompasses the renting of premises for the securing of gold and silver – both bullion or minted coins. Such places of deposit shall thus play an important part in the reestablishment of a bimetallic, trade-based economy until the inevitable return of the Osmanli- or Mughal-type mints and storage facilities which were financed by the Bayt al-Mal.

تحيرت في الحراء اثناء صومي

فخفت النظام خارج كهفى

نظام النفس لا نظام دولتي

 ثم نمت نوم السعادة رحمة لي

منه وعرفتها – أعدو عدوتي

Introduction to the forthcoming publication of the Al-Bahr al-Madeed fi Tafseer al-Qur’an al-Majeed

‘The Boundless Sea: A Tafseer of the Illustrious Quran’ by the mighty Scholar, Abu ‘Abbaas Ahmad bin Muhammad bin al-Mahdi ibn ‘Ajeeba al-Hasani

This translation assumes a certain basic knowledge of Islamic vocabulary. It is now over fifty years since Shaykh Dr. Abd al-Qadir as-Sufi initiated the use of transliterated Arabic for the key terms regarding the Law and the science of tasawwuf. It is clear that a corresponding transformation has taken place among the leading Muslims of Europe: by their adoption of such Arabic words as zakat rather than the completely false and misleading term ‘alms’, or deen rather than the minimalist word ‘religion’, or riba rather than the cosmetic term ‘interest’, they now have access to what these terms actually denote; and if the non-Muslim reader genuinely wishes to acquire a true understanding of the Quran, the Messenger peace be upon him, and the Muslims, then he too must be prepared to take the plunge into linguistic purity and leave behind the graeco-Latin, churchy-English coloured soup of the translations of Islamic texts undertaken by orientalists or Muslims still fettered by a christian past. The Quran comes to us in Arabic and Arabic is a vibrant living language which can still be clearly translated directly into European languages. The difference between this latter and one which comes to us via Isa’s Aramaic – to Greek, Latin and finally to the Old, Middle or Victorian English – is clear. It is a well-known phenomenon that when one translates a text into another language, then to another and to yet another and one then compares the outcome to the original then two often quite different texts result.

The Islamic health of a territory may be measured in accordance with the degree of use of correct Islamic terms amongst its ordinary inhabitants. This was well understood at the beginning of the twentieth century by the perpetrators of the linguacide of the Uthmani Turkish which at the height of its flowering contained well over the half of its vocabulary from the Arabic of the Quran and the sunna.

The reader shall find that consistency of spelling is not necessarily a priority in this translation: each nation transliterates its terms from the Quran and the sunna in harmony with the rythms of its own language. In this translation we have incorporated various forms of spelling in order to relax in their symphony of sound; and to keep the dear reader on his toes; and to avoid the hieroglyphics of diacritical marks, off-putting to the normal reader. And as anyone who searches in the internet knows, one must be aware of all the disparate spellings of any Arabic name or term if one wants to find all the entries. The cobweb Swiftian pinning down and helplessizing of the giant text through the use of endless footnotes is also avoided for the same reason. However, in general, the Arabic words which are in common use are written in the transliteration-form which is most common amongst European and American Muslims.

Or one might say:

Beware the charm of AbdalBasit’s recitation, lest the meanings have no fascination,

or first edition leather binding, blinding and enclosing

a text of utter tooled perfection where comma, composition and correction

count more than shattering revealings.

The mufassir’s often detailed analysis of the Arabic used in the ayats is of course crucial for his own initial understanding of the ayat; however it has usually been omitted unless of particular use in our understanding the text: given that Arabic is a semitic language and contains forms and constructions quite foreign to English it is often of little use to inform the general reader that a particular word ‘is’ or ‘corresponds to’ a second object, syndetic relative or a conjunction attached to a subjunctive, subject to apocope; and this, because, as often as not, they do not ‘correspond’ in any significant or practical way, although for want of a viable alternative these are used by orientalists. Some examples of his linguistic analysis from the opening ayas of al-Baqara have been left in order to show his methodology, and demonstrate his mastery of the Arabic and capacity to disclose the true meanings of any aya.